01 Jul 2008

Netflix Saves Profiles, Face

I was pleased to read today that Netflix has come to its collective
senses and decided to save the “Profiles”
feature. For those of you living under a rock, Profiles
was a neat feature that Netflix offered, allowing you to essentially
split your account into ‘sub-accounts’ each with their own queue and
number of simultaneous movies. This was pretty nice if you had
multiple people (say, family members, or you and a S.O.) sharing the
same account.

Their elimination of the feature was ostensibly to simplify the
website by removing a feature that few users actually took advantage
of, but many felt it was done more to encourage the purchase of
multiple accounts (which cost more than one account, even one with
many movies at a time).

This is by any measurement a good thing. Netflix avoided doing
something very stupid, and alienating its userbase (probably driving
more than a few of them right into the arms of the competition,
Blockbuster) by announcing its intentions, listening to the response,
and then changing their tune when it became obvious they were about to
shoot themselves in the foot. All good. This should be a lesson to
others on how to craft policy that affects your users.

Unfortunately, they had already disabled access to the feature for
most users, apparently in preparation for killing it outright. (Which
is a bit of a drag for folks like me, who were holding out because
they’d only heard of it as a result of the hubbub and didn’t want to
try something that was on its way out.) But according to the official
blog, the option to create new profiles will return in a couple of
weeks. Here’s hoping.